Posts Tagged ‘Roberts Space Industries’

Star Marine, the FPS side of Star Citizen [official site], was supposed to launch in April. The eventual grand plan includes integrating first-person face-shooting into the wider Star Citizen world, letting folks board ships and murder crews. As you’ll have guessed by now, the barebones initial release did not come in April.

Creator Chris Roberts explained in his latest Letter From the Chairman over the weekend that it’s been held back by a few technical problems and simply not being good enough to make a strong first impression.

Between the approaching onslaught of both virtual reality and alternate reality, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re living inside a science fiction novel. Star Citizen [official site] isn’t helping: version 1.1 is out now and includes two new ships, one of which costs up to $300. High priced microtransactions aren’t new, but Star Citizen’s ambitions are all a little too Back To Reality for me. And I can’t tell whether that’s made better or worse by the update also introducing a ship rental system that allows players to fly those expensive ships for seven non-consecutive days using in-game currency earned through space battles with other players.

Star Citizen [official site] is like the videogame eight-year-olds design on notebook paper when they’re supposed to be doing homework, only with actual development expertise and money behind it. That alone makes it fascinating. In his latest “Letter from the Chairman“, chief eight-year-old Chris Roberts says that they’ll soon be pulling those disparate notebook pages together, with “Arena Commander 1.1 (now with REC!), the FPS module and the so-called ‘social module,’ our first foray into the persistent universe” all due soon.

Star Citizen is all-consuming. It is the devouring omni-game, always in need of more genres to absorb. So comes the official reveal of the FPS ‘module’ of the game, used when not in the pilot seat, be that during planetfall, on stations or just popping out for a quick absolute zero stroll. As rumoured, it’s being outsourced to Nexuiz developers Illfonic. Admiral Chris Roberts, complete in space uniform, was at PAX Australia to show off the first footage of four vs four team battles on a space station. Check it out below.

Star Citizen‘s crowdfunding has been so successful that the space sim promised the moon. Or rather, it promised planets, and the ability to land on those planets and take part in ground-based exploring and fighting. This past week’s second Citizen Con 2014 Chris Roberts presented the feature in rough form, showing the transition from space to a planet surface and then the player walking around on foot.

When Star Citizen‘s combat module first took flight, there was frustration with its bugs and its controls. The massive patch 13, released on Saturday, works to address those complaints by introducing “additional controls for six degrees of freedom”, a new set of control options, along with a few new game modes including the ability to race new ships against your friends. Also they’ve made a Top Gear parody to talk about the new ships, confirming that Star Citizen is set in a dystopian future where Jeremy Clarkson’s malignant influence remains. Video and more details await below.

Star Citizen‘s dream of Internet spaceships has made its real steps into the tangible with the release this week of the crowdfunded space sim’s ‘dogfighting module,’ more formally known as Arena Commander. Backers can now blast off in their ships and blast each other, getting the first real idea of what the game that’s so far raised $44 million might actually be like. The Arena Commander update brings deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, and wave survival modes for online play, as well as a free-roaming mode. Spaceships, away!

All systems were so very nearly go for a Star Citizen dogfighting module launch today. Chris Roberts and co told everyone to mark their calendars. There was a lot to be done before the big day, but not so much that the former Wing Commander commander-in-chief couldn’t make all the nice outer space murder birdies fly. Or at least, that’s what everybody thought last week. Turns out, however, that the space bugs were a few too numerous to be smashed in such a short period of time, so the dogfighting module has been delayed again. Good news, though: you’re going to get daily development updates until the long-awaited combat alpha soars.

You might remember that Star Citizen‘s looooong-awaited dogfighting module was supposed to be out in April, but things happen. Things like a very, very rocky first public showcase, for instance. The slightly more deadly than usual fireworks show looked absolutely gorgeous when it worked, but a few disastrous space-outs sent ships infinitely spinning into oblivion. There were also physics errors and other various glitches. It had a long way to go, in other words. Apparently, however, it’ll finally be ready at the end of May. For real this time.

What started as an outer space scare worthy of its own Event Horizon movie ended up being a big misunderstanding. It all began with a Star Citizen community member, “Lauresh,” attempting to organize a women’s-only group in the wake of some especially, er, uncomfortable forum threads, a place to go hang out on days when the wider universe left her cold. Since this is the Internet, her plan was immediately met with a barrage of ugliness and vitriol. To top it all off, she was then banned from Star Citizen’s forums, an unceremonious opening of the airlock that rightfully left many eyebrows raised and confused. Apparently, however, that part was a huge mistake, and Roberts Space Industries not only wants to allow players of any sort to form their own groups, but plans to give them the tools to do so.

I hadn’t watched the Star Citizen PAX East footage that Nathan posted last week until this morning. It reminds me of that one dream where I go on stage to deliver a profound speech, and only realise mid-way through that I’ve forgotten to wear any trousers and am on fire. In front of a whooping crowd of avid spacers, Star Citizen lurched from one technical problem to another until it was barely fit for service. This is why so many on-stage ‘reveals’ show pre-canned footage with over-enthusiastic hollering in place of server connectivity issues. Eager to make amends, RSI have stitched together some new footage showing the aspects that failed or were shunted off due to a lack of time. It’s all below.

So it was promised, so shall it be. Chris Roberts said he’d lift the lid on Star Citizen‘s long-awaited dogfighting module in April, and now here we are. Previously, a sleepy hangar was The Final Frontier, but below you can watch Roberts take one giant leap into space’s infinite, gleaming black. It looks absolutely beautiful, but yeeeeeeeah this is still a very, very early game.

These are uncertain times. Oculus Rift got purchased by Facebook, and let’s face it: anyone could be next. You are probably cowering under some form of social-media-proof mountain outcropping as we speak. There really is precedent in Oculus’ actions, though. A large-scale Kickstarter project opted to pick the path of least less independence. And they gained a lot by doing so. One company that won’t be selling, though? Star Citizen developer Roberts Space Industries.